


How to Drink It

by Robbie_Berkowitz



Category: Among Us (Video Game), Freddy Got Fingered - Fandom, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Jurassic Park Original Trilogy (Movies), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Genre: Doomed Expedition, Eastern Orthodox Church, Gen, Grease References, Imposter, Instant Noodles, Judge Holden - Freeform, Medical Billing Software, Minesweeper - Freeform, Privilege, The Rat Pack, The Whimsy of Harry Potter, substance use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:21:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27992190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Robbie_Berkowitz/pseuds/Robbie_Berkowitz
Summary: Conditions rapidly deteriorate for Cyan as he attempts to survive in an increasingly inhospitable, alien environment.
Relationships: Crewmate/Imposter/Brand Ambassador for Cup-O-Noodles
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	How to Drink It

# How to Drink It

Cyan sees something horrible in the mirror, a terrible flash as his eyes scan Reactor. Yellow placed the mirror above the center console, hours ago, before she wandered off to download data. She said she would call a meeting soon to discuss next steps. That they were almost done. The mirror is small, square-shaped, **SAFETY BEGINS HERE** printed in blocky letters along the top.

What Cyan saw in the mirror was the bottom half of his spacesuit, with a clean white bone sticking up where his body should be.

Now he sees himself in the mirror, his full body, everything as it should be. So he reaches into his backpack and pulls out a small paper wrapper and tears it open to reveal a small syringe.

There is a dull hum all around him. His eyes sting from the invasive glare of the overhead lights. He activates the control panel by the discharge port on the tube of glowing white reactor liquid. 

The white reactor fluid is the foundation of transwarp space travel. He knows this. He also knows that more than a few drops will overwhelm the concentration he’s brewing in the Cup-O-Noodles he has carefully placed on the ground beside the discharge port. His hands are shaking. He can feel his heart beating like a cartoon alarm clock. He’s so close to finishing the concoction. 

There is an illustration of a dog in a sailor’s costume on the side of the Cup-O-Noodles. The dog has Crewmate features. 

The extraction goes smoothly. He carefully pushes a few drops out of the syringe into the concoction. 

The thing about the concoction is that you just have to know how to drink it.

This is how you make the concoction: mix Cup-O-Noodles broth, a thin strip of leaf from the cafeteria waste apparatus, a teaspoon of engine fuel from storage, and a few drops of white reactor fluid. The result is a drink the color of gasoline in a parking lot puddle. 

He watches the white reactor fluid dissolve in the darkness of the cup and then picks up the Cup-O-Noodles and takes a long sip. He looks down at the Cup-O-Noodles in his hand. The sailor dog is looking up at him, his arms crossed now, a stern look of disapproval.

The dog on the side of the Cup-O-Noodles says his name is Travis Garofalo. 

Cyan finds Red in Security, hunched over a large hardcover book, ignoring the camera feeds from the hallways. Red turns to face Cyan, who stands there clutching the Cup-O-Noodles.

“Do you detect an odor of petroleum?” Red asks.

“I’m wearing a Crewmate suit,” Cyan says “I can’t smell a thing.”

Red nods and leans back in his chair. 

“It’s just that as soon as I realized you were in here, I was overcome with a powerful gasoline smell. You don’t smell that?”

“No,” Cyan says. 

A thin plume of stream rises from the Cup-O-Noodles. Travis Garofalo has removed his sailor’s hat and untied his neckerchief.

“Are you an imposter?” Cyan asks.

“What kind of thing is that to ask a Crewmate working up the nerve to go to Shields to complete his final task?” Red asks. “I’m just taking a breather. A well-deserved break. I need to get myself ready, so I’m reading a book. Enriching my mind. Is that something an imposter would do? Come and see. It’s _Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets_. I feel a powerful urge to defend this book from its detractors. Ask any Crewmate for their opinion on the worst Harry Potter book, and—”

“Here,” Cyan says holding out the Cup-O-Noodles. “Drink this.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a little something I made.”

“But what is it?”

“What do you think Harry Potter would do?” Cyan asks. “Do you think Harry Potter would sit there asking questions? The answer is no. Harry Potter is a boy wizard with a fine-tuned sense of urgency. He doesn’t dither or equivocate. He acts. He is the prime mover.”

“Harry Potter’s decisions are carefully curated by the genius of Hermione Granger,” Red says. “Without her, for example, Harry Potter never would have come close to figuring out what was in the restricted area in book one, let alone advancing past the various tasks and figuring out the identity of the imposter among them. Without her he would simply be an average boy wizard, doomed to obscurity as his celebrity faded under the weight of unconquerable evil.”

“Hermione Granger would have been the one who found the recipe to this little beverage I’m offering you. She would have spent hours late at night in the restricted section of the library until she found the recipe in a dusty tome with teeth the size of spark plugs. She would have seen this potion’s psychonautic properties as essential to unraveling the mysteries of those who would do evil.”

“I’m not sure I can trust a Crewmate who claims to speak for anyone from the Harry Potter universe.”

“Look,” Cyan says. “Don’t talk to me like that about Harry Potter. You’ve never strolled through Diagon Alley on an empty summer’s afternoon, your hands in the pockets of your corduroy pants, the taste of butterbeer on your tongue as you ponder the whimsy and magic ahead. What I’m offering you is the chance to move beyond those lifeless pages in front of you. To step beyond dull placid words. To abandon this mean and stupid world of Dursleys. To know what it is to be in Ollivanders, a thestral tail hair cored English Oak in your hand as the lights grow brighter and your hair blows back from a directionless breeze.”

Later they are in Communications. Cyan has placed the empty Cup-O-Noodles on the floor beside him. Red is smoking a cigarette and staring at the screen on the computer terminal. 

Travis Garofalo has a cane and a top hat. He is engaged in a half-hearted Vaudeville routine on the side of the Cup-O-Noodles. He flips his cane around with his tail. He says in a singsong voice that the ants are eating the picnic lunch and that there is still time to turn back, to quit the ascent, but not much time, because the afternoon will soon end, and that up ahead, through a narrow slit in the rock, is the quiet stony peak where you can go to be alone forever. 

Maroon appears in the doorway. 

“You missed it,” she said. “We called a meeting. Everyone was there. We voted on Blue.”

“Voted to do what?” Cyan asks.

“Throw her out of the airlock.”

“You what?”

“Right out of the airlock with Blue. Something wasn’t right with her. She said our mission is futile. That it is doomed. She said our exploratory journey beyond the fringes of known space is an unmitigated disaster. She lost the faith. She spoke calmly as we prepared the airlock. She said this is a ship with no art in it. With no music. A ship without a library, without a chapel. Without love. That it is a cold, metallic void, a silent coffin where we scutter around like rodents, completing meaningless tasks. That the recent strange occurrences are not the work of a single imposter bent on subverting our expedition but rather a natural reaction to grim spiritual conditions that grow worse by the hour, the symptoms of a collective agony of souls starved of all that gives shape and color to a life. She had very obviously gone insane. And it is certainly not a stretch of the imagination to believe that she alone was responsible for the sabotage and disappearances that have afflicted us in recent days. But we have purged her madness. We can continue on now, unobstructed, unified in purpose and mind.” 

Cyan blinks.

Maroon’s head is gone, replaced by Muldoon’s head from _Jurassic Park_ , complete with his tan hat and intense gaze and coating of sweat. The silence of the ship is suddenly overrun with the desperate raspy shrieks of an unseen velociraptor, with flashing electric light and a howling tropical wind swirling about Communications. 

Red is undisturbed, smoking his cigarette with his back to the room, staring silently at the keyboard in front of him. Maroon Muldoon is gripping the edges of the doorway, holding on like something is pulling her away into the corridor.

“Shoot me!” Maroon Muldoon shouts over the noise. “ _Shoot me!_ ”

Cyan feels the wind all around him. The flashing light comes through his Crewmate visor and stings his eyes. Maroon Muldoon continues to demand to be shot as she clutches the frame of the entryway to Communications, as the wind disturbs the recording equipment near the door and knocks the Cup-O-Noodles on its side, causing it to roll away from Cyan. 

In a blink it’s all gone. Maroon’s head has returned. The room is still and silent. The Cup-O-Noodles is back upright beside Cyan, where Travis Garofalo stares, stony faced and silent. 

Maroon says it’s been nice catching up but now she’s got to skidootch to MedBay for a scan. 

Cyan lights a cigarette and lays down on the floor, staring at the ceiling, supine and motionless as he takes drags from the cigarette clenched between his teeth. He fills the inside of his helmet with smoke, obscuring the world beyond. He wonders how Harry Potter would conduct himself aboard this ship. Would the haunting ambiguity of the present crisis give way through the sheer power of Harry Potter’s will to a clearly defined narrative arc, with Harry Potter leading the good against those who would commit what must, in Harry Potter’s world, be understood only as unalloyed evil? Would relations among the Crewmates improve if they were sorted and then each of them conformed to the cultural and spiritual requirements of their respective house at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? 

Why don’t witches and wizards get high? 

Red looks up from the keyboard and turns around to face Cyan. 

Red says he is ready to confess. 

Red says he used to binge drink leftover Communion wine with a couple of Oranges and a Lime Green when they were all altar boys at a modest parish outside Possum Trot, Kentucky. 

Red says he stole $15 from the little Tupperware container where he and the other members of his den placed the proceeds from Crewmate Scout popcorn sales they made from a folding table in front of the Paducah Walmart, and that he told the den leader that he saw a quiet Blue from a rundown clapboard house on a narrow street in the bad part of town steal the money and pass it off to another Blue that walked off into the parking lot, and the den leader, a well meaning but not terribly observant or introspective Red, believed him, and the Blue was thrown out of the den, and Red got away with the money and was able to use it to buy _Freddy Got Fingered_ on DVD. 

Red says that in high school he talked a runaway, unstable Blue he used to get high with into dropping a rotting pumpkin off an interstate overpass, which caused a huge pileup that took the lives of two Purples and a Brown who were two days into a weeklong group odyssey to various textile-oriented museums across the Rust Belt, and that they had just completed a day at the National Quilt Museum when the bus just happened to be in the exact wrong spot at the exact right time, and that when the police came, he said the Blue had plotted the entire thing and that he tried to stop him but he wouldn’t listen, that he tried to physically intervene but was overpowered, and the police believed him because he came from a good home, was on the honor roll and an Eagle Scout and was, by all appearances, just the sort of upper middle class, God-fearing, patriotic, white milk drinking, please-and-thank-you sort of Crewmate who would stop at nothing to try to prevent a deranged lunatic from unleashing his degeneracy on the world.

Cyan can’t think about this right now. It occurs to him that the Harry Potter books never make clear whether witches and wizards were complicit in the crimes of communist and fascist regimes. He wonders whether Red _really_ thinks that _Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets_ is worth defending, or if it’s all an act. 

Red says it can’t be long now.

Cyan sits at one of the computers in the room and opens a game of Minesweeper and dies on his first click. He hadn’t known that was even possible. He closes his eyes and pictures Blue tumbling through space.

Travis Garofalo is dressed as an Eastern Orthodox patriarch. The whites of his eyes are gone, his pupilless irises now dull maroon pools. His floppy dog ears protrude from small holes on the sides of his skufia. He says that Red, for his many sins, shall never know the forgiveness of the Lord, or the warmth of uncorrupted suns. He says Red will burn in hell for what he has done.

When Cyan and Red left Security for Communications, they passed Reactor, where Yellow was standing in front of the **SAFETY BEGINS HERE** mirror, clutching the sides of her head and repeatedly shrieking the same question—why don’t I have a face? Behind her was a hastily assembled pile of famly photographs, a worn NIV study bible, a threadbare stuffed lion, all of her belongings in a loose dumped mass, burning in a modest fire, the little licks of flame working their way slowly across the doomed surfaces of her world.

Red says his dad told him to never be alone with a blue because they’re rotten and evil in a way that blocks out God, and that if you die around one your soul can’t go to heaven and you’ll just be trapped in a floating purgatory where you zip around the world interfacing with terminals and completing your tasks until you run out of things to do and then you can only watch the world go on without you forever and that the thought of being up there forever as an apparition kept him awake as a boy, still keeps him awake, wondering how long it will take for his mind to decay and whether he’ll even realize his mind is decaying and if time would continue to define his world as it presently does or if it becomes something more ethereal and abstract if enough time passes until all he ever is or was erodes into something shapeless and unknown.

Cyan wonders what life would be like if he had accepted a lucrative offer from his father to work a loosely defined corner office job at the family firm in Hartford, a prosperous little outfit that creates and sells medical billing software to several sprawling, for-profit hospital chains across New England. No thank you, Cyan said at the time. He had to do something that he knew in his heart was right. That he didn’t want to wake up at 40 and realize he hated going to work each day. That he wanted his work to be meaningful and important. 

That he had to be true to who he was.

The lights go out.

Red screams.

“The entertainment console,” he shrieks. “Everything is gone. It’s all replaced by _Freddy Got Fingered_. All of it. All of the movies, the TV shows, the games. It’s just _Freddy Got Fingered_ over and over again. I’ve never told anyone in my life what I just told you. What did you do?”

“You’ve been at the console the entire time,” Cyan says. “You’re the one who was in control. What did you do?”

Travis Garofalo is wearing a Statue of Liberty costume. He is moving on the Styrofoam wall of the cup, stumbling through a burning city, clutching his stomach, vomiting a dark mass that is a dreadful color Cyan has never seen. A color that has no name or six-digit hexadecimal code. Travis Garofalo says the disease is in us all. That the vultures will circle above but even they will ignore our blighted corpses in the quiet of days to come. That no feeling can save us now, not shame or hope or even the wordless personal energies of our souls. 

“You’re not real, Travis Garofalo,” Cyan says. “You’re just a face on a cup. I don’t want to hear any more of your prophecies.”

Red is facing away from Cyan again, staring at the entertainment console’s screen.

“Travis Garofalo,” Red says. “I know Travis Garofalo. That’s the name of a Blue I see in my dreams. It’s always the same dream. I’m at an airport, waiting for a connecting flight. I’m at a bar & grill style restaurant that seems very familiar, like an amalgamation of all the chain restaurants I’ve ever been to, and I’m at the bar, and all they’ve got is long-expired non-alcoholic beer and milk that’s leftover from Fruity Pebbles, like the milk was poured in a bowl of Fruity Pebbles and someone ate all the Fruity Pebbles and the vaguely pinkish-purple milk is all that’s left. They’ve got that used milk on tap.”

“You’ve got the whole world, in your hands,” Travis Garofalo whisper sings. “You’ve got the whole, wide world, in your hands.”

Cyan sees there is a revolver in his right hand. He’s clutching it so tightly it shakes. He opens the cylinder. Inside is a single bullet. On the bottom of the cartridge case, where it should say the bullet’s caliber, there is the word **KILL** over top a bloody skull. 

“And I’m sitting there trying to decide whether to order beer or milk, and in walks this Blue in a Shriner’s Fez and miner’s gear, and he sits down beside me and says his name is Travis Garofalo. He says he flew here from Cincinnati to tell me that he knows and that I’m not going to get away it.”

The alarm sounds—a reactor meltdown is imminent. 

“I ask him what it is he knows and what I’m not going to get away with, and he just laughs and laughs, and the room starts spinning, and all I can see is the Americana on the walls, always framed photos of the Rat Pack and Danny and Sandy from Grease, always Danny and Sandy and the Rat Pack, and the bartender, a Yellow, she just all of a sudden explodes in blood, and then it’s just her legs standing there, with a smooth white bone poking out where her spine ought to be.”

“I will never die,” Travis Garofalo says. Cyan looks over at the Cup-O-Noodles and sees nothing but blank Styrofoam. 

“It’s a big open universe,” Travis Garofalo says. “It’s a big open universe, and I will never die.”

“And then I start laughing,” Red says. “I just start laughing like I’ve never laughed before. I laugh and laugh and laugh. Travis Garofalo takes a look at me laughing and at the Yellow’s body, and he starts laughing, too. And the two of us are sitting there, laughing, and—"


End file.
